Red Mosquito

If anyone is coming to Lollapalloza Chile, let me know. I´ll be glad to meet one of the very special persons from RM.

Ill be there.

Lets keep in touch.

Any advice about Chile, ask me.

Birds in Hell wrote:Playing Lollapalooza Chile and Argentina next year.

I'm always glad to hear these guys aren't winding things back down.

Just read that they're opening three shows for Black Sabbath in Europe.

listening to Down on the Upside for the first time in forever...fucking A this thing is a beast of a record

rickson wrote:Lets keep in touch.

Any advice about Chile, ask me.

I went this year and had a blast. Santiago is beautiful.

zeb wrote:

Birds in Hell wrote:Playing Lollapalooza Chile and Argentina next year.

I'm always glad to hear these guys aren't winding things back down.

Just read that they're opening three shows for Black Sabbath in Europe.

Sounds like a good night out.

Spoiler: show

Reflection wrote:So this is pretty cool. Cornell is doing this on his current solo tour... (audio only)

That's pretty cool!

Just listening to DOTU for the first time in a long time, with good headphones. Man. Overfloater and Tighter & Tighter shine. Even Never Named, which I always thought was forgettable, kind of kicks ass.

Also, the Incessant Mace from Melbourne 1.18.94 is probably the best version they've ever played.

zeb wrote:

Hello Knights of the Soundtable faithful,

I will be taking 2014 off from Soundgarden touring due to prior commitments promoting "Lightning Bolt" with my brothers in Pearl Jam and the desire to have more time at home with my family. I am trying to balance the many twists and turns of my awesome music career. This is temporary. I am still an active member of Soundgarden. Chris, Ben, Kim and I are in the process of finding the perfect substitute for the upcoming Soundgarden dates in 2014.

Thank you all for listening and the Years of Support!

Loudest of Love.
Matt Cameron

Pearl Jam

King animal is an anagram of Animal king.

dimejinky99 wrote:King animal is an anagram of Animal king.

Angina Milk.

harmless wrote:

dimejinky99 wrote:King animal is an anagram of Animal king.

Angina Milk.

main glinka

JUST ANNOUNCED: Soundgarden at Festival in Auschwitz Poland on June
27, 2014. Tickets on-sale Wednesday.


Here come the Holocaust jokes.

DeLima wrote:Also, the Incessant Mace from Melbourne 1.18.94 is probably the best version they've ever played.

I surfaced that recording.

matt reeder wrote:

DeLima wrote:Also, the Incessant Mace from Melbourne 1.18.94 is probably the best version they've ever played.

I surfaced that recording.

I know you did! I thanked you at the time and will cheerfully do so again

http://consequenceofsound.net/2013/11/s ... king-back/

Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil: Growing Up and Looking Back

BY LEN COMARATTA ON NOVEMBER 26TH, 2013 IN FEATURES, INTERVIEWS

In the beginning, there were three: Kim Thayil, Hiro Yamamoto, and Bruce Pavitt. After collectively moving from the Midwest to Seattle, the former two would go on to form Soundgarden, one of the most notable of the Seattle bands that would go on to craft the “Seattle Sound.” The latter went on to form Sub Pop, the label that curated the majority of those who contributed to the grunge movement.

Twenty-five years on, Sub Pop has been celebrating its silver anniversary for most of this year, and as part of that celebration, Soundgarden is doing a bit of partying of their own. Four years after regrouping and a year after its explosive return with King Animal, Soundgarden teamed up with Sub Pop to remaster and reissue their first couple of EPs, Screaming Life and Fopp. Reuniting with grunge producer extraordinaire Jack Endino, the remastered EPs are not only available for the first time digitally, but also on vinyl again to make up for the less-than-stellar late-’90s printings.

Consequence of Sound caught up with Thayil to discuss the reissues, what took so long for them to get the treatment, and what’s in store for the rest of Soundgarden’s early catalog.

I’m going to be honest with you. Because I’m kind of an older guy, the curmudgeon in me sees this as Sub Pop capitalizing on your reformation, but the music fan in me is cheering that your older stuff, which happens to be my favorite era of yours, is finally getting some long overdue love.

Yeah. I wouldn’t think that Sub Pop is capitalizing in any cynical way, since we were the ones that really were kind of pushing to get the record back in print. It’s been out of print for a while, so, I think, for all parties, we could all benefit from keeping the thing available. And, certainly for the fans, many fans have asked about it. It’s never been issued on iTunes or anything like that. We’re mainly just attending to something that’s been neglected for over a decade.

Endino, describing the project, wrote that this reissue marks the first time that these tracks have been made available digitally. He was referring to digital files, not CDs, right?

Screaming Life was put out on CD in the early ’90s. Maybe there was a limited run in the late ’90s, but early ’90s it came out on CD. It wasn’t a very good package. We weren’t too happy with it. I don’t think the guys at Sub Pop were happy with it. Nothing had been done to improve the audio quality. This time we had Jack oversee the mastering process. The artwork is capturing the original 12” EPs’ packaging, updated. There’s some new stuff obviously for the extra material that’s there. We’re doing a double disc with the FOPP EP and the Screaming Life EP, and then the CD which is compiling all of this for the first time.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that none of this stuff got reissued when you blew up on A&M.

In the early ’90s when the CD version of Screaming Life and FOPP first came out, we were on A&M then because Louder Than Love came out in ’89. Now, when we blew up on A&M, ’93, ’94, whenever that was, we had an outstanding negotiation to attend to regarding the Sub Pop record and contract. There were changes at Sub Pop, there were changes with the band over the years, and it just got pushed to the side and not attended to.

So, what kicked it in the rear to get it going now?

When the band broke up in ’97, ultimately, our record company, A&M, kind of folded. Everyone there left and management folded, and it became a real stripped-down operation. The band was gone, so there was really nobody minding the store. I’d bring it up every once in a while. Getting the ball rolling was kind of a difficult thing. Sub Pop had had some changes there, and they’d kind of moved on to other projects. When the band got back together again four years ago, it was to attend to this kind of neglect, having an online presence, a website, getting the catalog items that were out of print back into print. And, in the past four years, this was on the side, running parallel to our current projects. Finally, we started attending to it to coincide with the 25th anniversary of Sub Pop, even though Screaming Life was released a year before the official inception of Sub Pop.

I never really knew how entwined Soundgarden’s and Sub Pop’s origins were.

Yeah, I think many people don’t know that. I think many people don’t know the entire story. The artwork for the cover of Louder Than Love is designed by Bruce Pavitt, and very similar to the design he did for Screaming Life, which is pretty much his strong suit, you know, packaging and coming up with novel images, and use of Charles Peterson’s photograph. I probably met [Bruce] when I was 11 years old. We both grew up in the same small town outside of Chicago. Charles Peterson, Mark Arm, these are guys I knew before Green River or Soundgarden were ever formed. These guys I knew back in college. But, yeah, there’s a lot of that. I knew Jon and Bruce because I worked at the radio station [KCMU, now KEXP], and Jonathan [Poneman] was a DJ there, Bruce was, and I was. I got those two guys to work together over the Screaming Life Soundgarden project. Bruce was interested. We were kind of one of the two biggest bands in the Seattle, or original, indie music scene, and both Bruce and Jonathan wanted to make a record for us or with us. One of them had some financial resources, the other one had some social and political resources, and we thought that they would work well together.

There was some hesitation and resistance from both parties. Neither of them felt that they required the other one for the project, and I insisted. Bruce has this label and has established somewhat of a thriving network through correspondence with other labels and magazines. Jonathan had this good rapport with radio stations, college radio stations, around the country. He has some financial resources. Bruce had already put out a couple records that had established the brand Sub Pop. Eventually, they agreed to work together on our project, and our record came out in ’87. Now, it was the next year in ’88 when Sub Pop opened its doors, and had its offices, and the partnership was sealed down in paper, and financially and legally agreed to. So, that’s why this past summer they were celebrating the silver anniversary, the 25th anniversary of Sub Pop, because, I guess it officially started [laughs] a year after they put out our record. So, I guess, technically, we’re not part of that silver anniversary… Sub Pop prime or something.

There ya go, Proto Sub Pop. Well, you did only two EPs with Sub Pop before joining SST. Why not put a full-length out with Sub Pop?

Our interest was in putting a full-length album out. Jonathan wanted to put out a full-length. We did, too. We had so much material. We had been together since ’84, but by ’87 we had, I don’t know, 40, 50 songs. We wanted to do an album’s worth of material, at least. But, wisely, Bruce said, “Look, there are a lot of bands out there. There are a few strong indie labels that are putting bands out. We’re trying to establish the label brand and the Seattle identity. Soundgarden, you’re a new band, why should someone shell out nine bucks for an album by a band they’re barely acquainted with? Perhaps they’ve read about them or heard anecdotal stories about our live show.” Bruce said, “Put out an EP and make it available for like five, six bucks, and you don’t force someone to commit to 40, 45 minutes of material. They get a nice, quick 25 minutes of material, and it only cost them five or six bucks. It’s a risk that a young indie record collector or buyer might take.” And, I understood that, myself barely having enough money to cover the rent. In my young 20s, it was hard to scarf up the 20 or 30 bucks every few weeks to get the new Butthole Surfers or waste it on this band called Soundgarden from Seattle.

We did the album with SST, Ultramega OK, because they certainly had more resources financially and network-wise at the time than Sub Pop did. They had the money to put us into a 16-track studio as opposed to the eight-track studio that we did with Jack Endino, and Reciprocal Studios, and Sub Pop Records. So, we thought, okay, Greg? [Ginn] from SST and Black Flag wants to put us in a 16-track, he has the money to do it, and Sub Pop didn’t really have the kind of cash flow that they developed with the singles of the month club. We had been touring. We were ready to make another record, and along comes this label that we’ve loved for years, SST, and you get the guitarist from Black Flag saying, “We want to put you in a 16-track. We think we know who we want to have record you,” and we thought, “Excellent, okay, let’s do it.” Of course, Sub Pop wanted us to stay with them, and we sentimentally wanted to stay with them, but they just weren’t in a position to finance another record.

Why did you only stay with SST for one album?

Well, with these indie labels, for one, you only really had to commit to one or two albums. The major labels would go off and try to commit you to six or seven. Now, young bands thought that was flattering. “Hey, Warner Brothers wants to sign us for a seven-record deal.” Well, in no way does that obligate the record label to make seven records for you, that they’re so confident in you that they’ll spend money on you over the next 10 years. Ultimately, it’s a way that the band is obligated. So, when record companies started offering us six-record deals, seven-record deals, we thought, why would we want to be obligated or under contract to them for that period of time? There’s no guarantee that we’d even make one record, let alone six or seven. Indie labels usually had a commitment of one record, sort of like monthly rent. That was a lot better for us. I think it’s better for all bands, but certainly for indie bands, to not get tied down to one label. Had we had that kind of a record contract with Sub Pop, we might not have gotten around to Ultramega OK for maybe another year or so, because Sub Pop didn’t have the resources.

So, we had a one-record deal with SST. We could have easily made another record with them, but by that time we had started getting interest from Slash Records, Geffen Records, A&M, Epic. These guys were coming out to our shows. While we were in conversations with these guys, we had to hire a manager and management hired a lawyer. These conversations were going on while touring Europe and the US on the SST record. We were trying to balance a number of things. And, while all the SST resources, well, many of the resources, were being thrown into Soundgarden, we also had major labels offering us money to make a demo. In the meantime, Sub Pop, with very little money, put little of it into us, so I think we kind of got lost.

In that period of time, I think to some degree, Sub Pop figured, well the large indie, SST, could help promote Soundgarden, and that’ll help promote the Screaming Life record and the FOPP EP. Sub Pop turned around and put their money into Mudhoney, really heavily into Mudhoney, a little also to Tad, and Nirvana to a lesser degree. So, SST put some money into us, but they knew that these major labels were also negotiating with us, so they thought they’d let the major labels take on some of the promotional burden. So, ultimately, we just kept getting passed down the line, and in that period of time, our association with Sub Pop kind of got lost.

So, was it just a matter of, in recent years, catching back up with Bruce, or somebody else?

No. We all live in Seattle. We all have mutual friends and see each other at similar shows and parties.

So, you never became totally estranged?

No. We were never estranged. The nature of Sub Pop and Soundgarden at that point was… it was indie and amateur. Our interest was entirely for the excitement and love of playing and recording. There was no strange breach that you’d find in a professional, contractual relationship. We’re all part of the same community and always have been. Even long after we were off of Sub Pop, we played shows with Mudhoney in Europe, toured with them there. We played shows with Nirvana and Tad. We took Tad on tour in Europe in ’94. Matter of fact, we were on tour with Tad when we got the news of Kurt’s death. Our relationship with Seattle bands and with Sub Pop diminished in only that we weren’t on the label.

You’ve worked with some heavy producers, Endino certainly one of them. When did you as a band begin producing yourselves?

I think from the beginning. Even when we worked with Endino it was a co-production sort of thing. And, the Ultramega OK was a co-production thing. It may have even been credited that way. Rock bands are different than dance bands. The producer with a popular dance artist may be involved with the songwriting, the arrangement, and the hiring of outside musicians to perform on it. With rock bands, they tend to write their own material, perform their own material, so the producer is pretty much the guy that records them, and sets the mics up, and comes up with ways and novel ideas to get sounds, and to record and make the records.

They’ll handle the budget, turn the tape on and off [laughs], when they had tape machines. That’s kind of what a rock producer does. It’s a little bit different than the idea of producer as filmmaker. So, with us, since we’re writing the songs, we understand the arrangements, which we developed. Many of our songs, back during Sub Pop and Ultramega OK, our first three albums really, the Sub Pop, SST album, and our A&M debut, most of those songs were tried and true live over a period of years, so we knew what worked. If we had a chorus that was too long, it would have been shortened by then. So, we didn’t need a producer to tell us how to arrange our songs, and like I said, most rock bands generally don’t.

Soundgarden is no stranger to covers. The band has done songs by the Stones, Beatles, and Doors. Certain covers make sense, Iggy’s “Search and Destroy”, the dirty blues of Howlin’ Wolf. How in the hell did you end up covering the Ohio Players?

That makes way more sense to me than Howlin’ Wolf, because I never wanted to do that song [laughs]. You’re talking about “Smokestack Lightning” off Ultramega OK. Jack Endino and I had a conversation about that over the past week. We specifically talked about that song amongst others. I told him I never wanted to do that song. Nobody in the band owns up to who pushed that song. I’m pretty sure it was Hiro, because I was not a giant blues fan. I understand the relationship between blues and rock, but there’s something about blues that is just kind of repetitive and redundant to me.

Blues arrangements are all kind of the same. They’re 1-4-5. When you listen to blues, you want to listen to a good performance and maybe a catchy lyric, and that’s about it. I don’t really listen to it for the songs. Maybe the riffs, here and there. I just have a different relationship with it than maybe the British bands from the ’60s did with American blues. The Ohio Players song, that’s a song I had loved since I was a kid. I grew up in Chicago. “Love Rollercoaster” was just an amazing song. I bought the album Honey by the Ohio Players primarily because of the song “Love Rollercoaster”, but ended up falling in love with the song “Fopp”. It just had that cool riff and groove.

So, we kind of learned it and twisted it around a little bit just because it was fun to do. Hiro, our bass player, who’s also from Chicago, has always had an interest in R&B. We did a P-Funk song. We did “Lunchmeataphobia”. We never recorded it, but we played it live probably back in ’86, ’87. I played it pretty bad. It’s a pretty quick riff. Hiro and Matt [Cameron, drummer] had it down. They had the groove down. There’s some weird syncopation that, as a rock guitarist, would throw me back then. We always did stuff like that. We did Sly & the Family Stone. Our John Peel Session, we did “Thank U (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)”. We did, also, a couple of my favorite records, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, and I recommend the Greatest Hits for Sly & the Family Stone. Another song with a really long title, we did a Beatles’ song, “Everyone’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey”. As far as doing R&B songs, that’s probably just our Chicago roots, Hiro and mine.

One of the critiques of King Animal was that though the four of you sounded older, it was as if you all had aged together, that in itself being a testament to your chemistry as a band. How was it working together again?

It’s different, it’s the same. I think I’ve done a few interviews regarding that question, and at times I can put my finger on it, sometimes I can’t. We’re all older, more mature. There’s certainly, I think, with Matt and Chris [Cornell, vocalist/guitarist]‘s experiences over the past 10 years, touring and making records, they may have developed a more professional outlook with the role they play in a band. Ben [Shepherd, bassist] and I, of course, are more mature. Everyone’s grown up. Some of us have families, and certainly, when you start a family, you are no longer the center of your own universe. Your kids become the center.

I think there’s a certain maturity and perspective that we have as individuals. The chemistry… there’s a way, I mean, after so many years of playing together, there’s a way that we communicate, and a certain rapport we have with each other, that we weren’t sure how it would have changed or even if it was still there, but it was almost exactly the same. We just started jamming together, and the way we communicated musically, and the way we would share song ideas was very much the same. I can’t quite picture how it was different other than technologically there were some changes. We weren’t sharing cassette demos [laughs].

Well, thanks for your time tonight, Kim. Good luck with the reissues.

Thanks a lot, and hopefully we’ll talk to you in the future when we dig into our catalog in the next year.

Certainly. I was going to ask if Ultramega OK or Louder Than Love was going to see any reissue love.

I’ve actually never gotten a clear answer as to whether Louder Than Love is in print or not. I assumed it was because every once in a while I would run into it in a record store, but I’ve run into used CDs, so I’m not sure.

What a great interview, cheers zeb.

Good news about the rarities collection sounding as though it's going to be out next year.

malice wrote:

harmless wrote:

dimejinky99 wrote:King animal is an anagram of Animal king.

Angina Milk.

main glinka

Mini Klan Al